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theodp writes "In mid-May, the Department of Homeland Security quietly expanded a program that allows foreign science, technology, engineering and math grads to work in the U.S. for 29 months without a work visa. 'Attracting the best and brightest international talent to our colleges and universities and enabling them to contribute to their professional growth is an important part of our nation's economic, scientific and technological competitiveness,' explained DHS Chief Janet Napolitano. But last week, Senator Chuck Grassley called on the GAO to 'fully investigate' the student visa program, citing reports of abuse and other concerns in his letter. Now, Computerworld reports that the DHS STEM Visa Extension Program continues to be dominated by Stratford University and the University of Bridgeport (as it was in 2010), prompting some tongues to wag. It is 'obvious to any reasonable person that the schools producing most of the OPT students are not prestigious research universities,' quipped policy analyst Daniel Costa, 'which means that many of the OPT students across the country are not in fact the "best and brightest."' While conceding that top students can come from lesser-known schools, 'those will be the exception to the rule,' argued Costa, who suggested the government should include performance metrics in the OPT program, such as grades and university rankings."

I cannot see what the issue is: is it to sell this story as a problematic for patriots? USA was always standing for "acquiring the best" and this rule is here to exactly work this out, in this new era where xenophobia is getting a second, and IMHO rather unfortunate, wind.

If anything, this is patriotic. What, is anyone afraid that those people granted work without a VISA will make a run for it when their months are up, and give up their opportunities for high profile positions and hefty salaries to escape i

Many of us are tired of the all the xenophilia that seems to have taken over our government and most of our institutions. Everything in the U.S. seems to be run for the benefit of anyone in the world except American citizens.

Every position held by one of these visa holders is a position that an American citizen does not hold. A position, remember, that is at an institution at least partially (if not wholly) supported by American taxpayers. More people are asking why our money is going to benefit other countries' citizens, instead of our own?

But it doesn't matter what argument I give; you'll call me racist anyway.

China's trade surpluses are rapidly disappearing. The USA's trade deficits are not. If the rest of the world doesn't have a problem trading with China, and the USA runs large deficits with many countries other than China, maybe the root of the problem is in America and not China.

If America is indeed a meritocracy, that means then that Americans are not as qualified to hold that job as the foreigners are. So now you are faced with a couple of decisions:* you make hiring decisions not based on merit, but based on whether a person is related to you. In other words, you turn the US from a meritocracy into an aristocracy.* you decide that the foreigners are getting too much of a leg up, because any bonus to immigrants gives them too much of a leg up over Americans. In which case, you are tacitly admitting that the US is really just the same as all other countries, and American exceptionalism is dead.* you decide that all economists are wrong, and that there really is just a static set of jobs available, that putting someone unqualified in a position has no impact on the overall economy, and by the way, isolationism works just splendidly.* you decided that the economists might be right, but that you just don't like foreigners. In which case, you just proved the old saw that nobody hates new immigrants like old immigrants.

In other words: get the fuck out of my country. Oh, and all you upmodders - the same goes for you.

Your argument fails at the very first assumption, that we are in a simple meritocracy.

The first point you miss is money:

If a foreigner (via this program, H1B visa, or any others) is only half-as-good as an American, but is willing to work for one third the pay... well...

Also consider the future, through trends established with a program like this. If we give outsource all the low-level tech jobs, low level American techs won't have a starting point. Not every college grad is going to immediately land

Every position held by one of these visa holders is a position that an American citizen does not hold... more people are asking why our money is going to benefit other countries' citizens, instead of our own?

The easy and obvious way to solve this problem is to give those people citizenship.

Most H-1Bs and green card sponsorees are ordinary people doing ordinary work, NOT "the best and the brightest".

"Computer-related H-1Bs have a median age of 27.4; 52% have less than 2 years of experience, and another 41% have 2-5 years."

Only 3% of a typical MSFT H-1B visa intake are US DoL level-four workers -- i.e., do work that requires independent judgment. Most H-1b use "level one" which is 17th percentile of U.S. wages -- $10k to $15k below what average-skilled Americans get paid. The 75th percent

The reasons people want to LEAVE such countries are the same reasons we shouldn't let ALL of them in or we just duplicate the problems they fled in the first place!

Sure, but TFA is decidedly not about letting "all" in - it's about letting the cream of the crop in. Which sounds like a sensible immigration policy for any country.

Though, really, what's needed is some reasonably efficient filter that doesn't let in people whose cultural baggage is outright incompatible with the basic tenets of the society they're immigrating to. Was it Netherlands that had recently introduced a "porn test" to screen out Islamist fundies? We need more of that kind of thing across the entir

Hope you have a job. Because programs like this will insure that US graduates get to earn postdoc qualifications in burger-flipping while foreign students that are eager for jobs paying much more than they could get at home will take what employment there is.

Look around and see what other first-world countries are doing for immigration. Most have far more restrictive policies than the US does and is far, far harsher for anyone violating their laws. Overstay your visa in Germany and you will likely be arrested and shipped out of the country. Walk into Mexico and you will find that their border is defended by the Mexican Army, and they do defend their border vigorously, with armed response to invaders.

The US is still allowing huge numbers of legal immigrants in and these people are competing for the same jobs that US graduates are. Absolutely, we can employ cheaper foreign labor in all areas of employment - but we better figure out how to support the jobless that aren't going to get what jobs there are. You see, we finally have the economy that functions without a huge unjustifiable bubble - and at least 30% of the country is unemployed or underemployed. Meaning that STEM graduates are working at McDonalds because there simply aren't the STEM jobs to go around.

And we want to bring in more people for these jobs that will work cheaper? As I said, hope you have a job - because with programs like this you will be supporting 2-3 non-working people. There simply is no choice in the matter any more. We are going to have to return to permanent government support for the folks that aren't working.

Hope you have a job. Because programs like this will insure that US graduates get to earn postdoc qualifications in burger-flipping while foreign students that are eager for jobs paying much more than they could get at home will take what employment there is.

Life isn't a zero-sum game. It's entirely possible for you and me to both have jobs.

Look around and see what other first-world countries are doing for immigration. Most have far more restrictive policies than the US does and is far, far harsher for anyone violating their laws. Overstay your visa in Germany and you will likely be arrested and shipped out of the country. Walk into Mexico and you will find that their border is defended by the Mexican Army, and they do defend their border vigorously, with armed response to invaders.

Wow, that explains why Mexico is so prosperous and stable.

The US is still allowing huge numbers of legal immigrants in and these people are competing for the same jobs that US graduates are. Absolutely, we can employ cheaper foreign labor in all areas of employment - but we better figure out how to support the jobless that aren't going to get what jobs there are. You see, we finally have the economy that functions without a huge unjustifiable bubble - and at least 30% of the country is unemployed or underemployed. Meaning that STEM graduates are working at McDonalds because there simply aren't the STEM jobs to go around.

Limiting the number of people isn't going to help. Like I mentioned before -- not a zero sum game. More people => more need for stuff => more jobs.

And we want to bring in more people for these jobs that will work cheaper?

Do you want to work in a field, picking vegetables? No? Are you willing to pay twice as much for all of your vegetables? No? Then stop making life even harder for the people with the worst jobs. Immigrants work most of our crap jobs because Americans *won't do them for any amounts of money*.

Actually it's probably a negative-sum, because a lot of migrants not only take jobs, but they send their wages out of the country, and often receive more in government benefits than they've paid for. They may lower prices, but the cost of labor is a tiny fraction of prices, and any business's priority is amassing profits first. No, 5% cheaper broccoli does not justify disrupting law and order, undermining the political system, and engaging in human trafficking on a massive scale

We're bringing in STEM people on OPT visas to pick vegetables for us? Really?

Reasonable point, but I think the answer is basically the same -- the vast majority of Americans don't go into engineering majors, and of those that do, a lot of them aren't any good at it. More competent people => larger/more successful companies => more jobs.

The problem is that we're already making stuff using less labor, leaving lots of people unemployed no matter how much growing demand there is for even more stuff. In our current economic system unemployment means poverty, and unemployment is pretty much guaranteed for an increasingly large fraction of the population. Bringing in even more labor certainly does not solve that problem.

We need to find something for all our "surplus labor" to do, so that they can be employed (hopefully doing something useful, not just busy-work making more disposable junk for people to consume), or we need to find some way to provide a decent living for growing masses of chronically unemployed or underemployed people (oh noes, socialism!).

I don't necessarily disagree here, although I think there's likely other (possibly bettter) solutions, like reducing the barrier to entry for small companies (currently, taxes make it incredibly expensive to start a small business).

If you look at countries that are actually prospering (unlike Mexico), such as Canada and Australia and New Zealand, you'll find that they treat immigrants very differently based on their skill levels. People with no skills and education, they don't want in those countries, because they'll be a drain on their social-welfare systems. However, highly skilled people in highly-demanded professions, they roll out the red carpet for; engineers are one big sector for this. There's not enough "knowledge workers"

spending my tax money in a way antithetical to the betterment of the country, economy, etc., in order to improve the profit margins of certain industries? yes, I believe those could be termed evil profits. or at a minimum rather unethical profits if we don't want to paint with just black and white.

Because you don't get mod points often and they don't want people wasting them on Spam, that's what the little flag in the bottom right is for these days. Obviously people use their mod points to kill it anyway, so it's probably a moot point, but I think that's the idea. And besides, 'offtopic' is accurate enough if you think about it.

We already have 320 million people in this country! I'd really, really be interested in knowing what skill set isn't represented here, such that we need to import it. Yes, I understand that we're discussing highly skilled people here. However, highly skilled isn't necessarily interchangeable with highly in demand. We already have plenty of Ph.D level people in STEM fields currently unemployed. What makes the foreign talent so much more attractive?

Yes, but people who do science are supposed to do it because they love it! Not for the money. So they should be happy to receive a pittance, because the people in management are doing their jobs because they love money, so they deserve to earn more of it, by giving puny salaries to the scientists.

Its not about the import, its the imprint the young minds got when they return home.
That cute, lazy, rich, poor, gifted 20 something might recall his/her time in the US and buy up big as some CEO, political leader or allow a deal as a lawyer in their 50's/60's.
It cuts past left/right/faith/dictator/nationalism as it was part of their life. The US know to invest in that gift long term.
The US is producing generational 'friends' around the world i.e. foreign talent has potential, another US grad from an el

Public Universities should not be accepting foreign students over U.S. students. They may say they want the "prestige" of having a diverse student body or say that they have some hot shot kid from one of the Stan countries, but no matter. They were created for and their job is to provide a higher education for the American public. Especially since they are largely financed by U.S. Taxpayers.

Private Universities? As long as they are let in under the rules and not given precedence over those who have been in line, fine, go ahead.

It seems that most of the institutions of higher learning have forgotten what their purpose is and instead strive to have the most bling... people or programs or things.

I went to a state school and foreign students were split roughly into three equal-sized groups. 1) The ones who avoided anyone else not from their part of the world, thus not helping the school's cultural diversity 2) The ones who "Americanized" a little too hard and spent most of them time drunk, arrested or deported and 3) The ones who actually helped the goal of spreading diversity by experiencing American cultural while still introducing others to their own. Of course, I'd take all of them over the mobs of inner city kids they shipped up from NYC to go to school for free who inevitably flunked out after the second semester.

Foreign students pay full out of state tuition which helps keep the public universities afloat financially. If that wasn't the case then the tuition would rise for all students, which would lead to only rich students getting in. There is a balance to be had between too many foreign students and higher in-state tuition. Lets not get all xenophobic and lose our ability to reason.

U.S. out of state students pay out of state tuition. There are more U.S. out of state students than foreign students.
Nice try troll.

Not really. Many of them become state citizens after the first year, ergo paying in-state tuition. Granted that the OP is exaggerating foreign students' contribution to keeping tuition low. BUT so are you. At the risk of bringing up a cliche, the truth is in the middle.

It isn't that unreasonable to be upset at what the article is about; there are abuses of the OPT visa, and those abuses ought be fixed.

At the same time, it is important to understand what letting foreign students and giving them a shot at employment does. A lot of the US's economic lead comes from the fact that we basically imported the best of Europe's population just prior to and after WWII. The current programs extend this: essentially steal the best and most talented people from around the world by providing them with good opportunities.

I did my graduate work at a large & relatively prestigious state school; I was the only US citizen in my research group. Everyone else was an immigrant. Except for one person who got lucky and won the green card lottery (literally a lottery) while still a student, every single one of them used the OPT visa at some point. They've all gone on to make valuable contributions to the US, as research scientists, faculty, and founders of a start up. The US is better off for them immigrating, and becoming permanent residents.

So you should be angry when there are abuses of these sorts of visa programs. If there's too much abuse, these programs will be cut back, or even cancelled, and we'll stop getting the benefit of stealing the world's most talented people.

Public Universities should not be accepting foreign students over U.S. students. They may say they want the "prestige" of having a diverse student body or say that they have some hot shot kid from one of the Stan countries, but no matter. They were created for and their job is to provide a higher education for the American public. Especially since they are largely financed by U.S. Taxpayers.

Private Universities? As long as they are let in under the rules and not given precedence over those who have been in line, fine, go ahead.

It seems that most of the institutions of higher learning have forgotten what their purpose is and instead strive to have the most bling... people or programs or things.

Let me stop you right there with three points.

1. No one is saying that US students are passed over foreign ones. Do you have proof that this is what is happening?

2. The truth of the matter is that US students are not going in droves into STEM fields at the 4-year level, let alone the grad level. This is the truth. Suck on it and deal with it. The US STEM intelligentsia is disproportionally composed of foreign-born nationals. US students do not get passed over. They simply chose to study for Marketing or Creative Writing.

3. Why not use tax payers to get the best and brightest from abroad to study here and become US nationals? That's better use of of taxpayers money (my money, your money) than funding yet another graduate in Creative Writing burdened by a $100K loan.

It was a foreign-born citizen who created USB, and another one who helped create google. And many more created a lot more shit while the rest of us were content studying for useless degrees, while complaining why US students get passed over (which is not true.)

A little bit more perspective and a little less of this stupid faux victim look-at-me syndrome is what you need.

For the US students being passed over yes it has been happening and increasing the last 2-3 years.
It is really bad in California where you have been getting some news about it, even heard about it where I live in Europe.
The reason is that that foreign students pay the full tuition costs and since states have been cutting funding the foreign students are cash cows.
You could make the case that with the money they are paying they are not taking slots that US students would of had because the slots would not

Public Universities should not be accepting foreign students over U.S. students.

Foreign students usually pay full tutition. So by admitting more foreign students, the universities can afford to admit more U.S. students, who usually have much of their tuition subsidized by the taxpayers. The limiting factor is money, not the number of chairs currently in the classrooms.

The limiting factor is money. They can fund only so many seats in the classroom. Those seats attract asses, it's a natural law, of course. By getting a higher proportion of foreign students, they make more money to fill those chairs rather than lose it to scholarships. And foreign students don't just whip out their checkbooks, their government does. And their government usually wants them to come home after getting their degree.

A major expansion of the program occurred in 2008 under Bush and is now expanded again by Obama. Over 400000 OPT Visas from 2006-2010, so this is the same scale at H1B. The DHS press release has the usual, if questionable, justification: this is only for the best of the best of the best and there are no US workers with these skills.

Lies and quiet scheming have replaced honest discussion with US citizens.

Let me rephrase that: "Why would anyone qualified be interested in that?". Sure, 29 months sounds long, but if you have to leave at the end, it is basically wasted time. The "best and brightest" do typically not fall for that kind of scam. In any sane country, you can extend your stay and, after a time, apply for citizenship with good probability of getting it.

Lots of people who really are 'the best and brightest" take OPT; when used correctly it is a "bridge" visa to something more permanent. E.g. a student graduates, takes 90 days (or less) to find a job, starts at an employer under OPT, the employer starts the H-1B application process, and within 6-9 months the students qualifies for H-1B. This is especially useful for people who graduate after the current year's H-1B allotment has run out; they can't possibly successfully apply until the next year, so the

I've seen OPT used properly and effectively for very talented foreign students. I've been around very good universities and I can confirm OPT is critical at keeping top-tier foreign students here in the US. The most common cases are (a) the summer grad school gap when changing schools and (b) a gap between graduation and an employment visa. The former may seem trivial, but it can allow a student to finish up a research project at University A before moving on to University B (e.g., undergrad to grad, MS to

Also, the 'prestigious research universities' are probably sitting back waiting for the 'best and brightest' to apply, while Stratford and Bridgeport probably have people actively trying to promote and entice students to come and avail of the opportunity.

A lot of the 'up and coming' PhD's in American traditionally came from the middle class. Destroy the middle class, like what's been happening here in the States for the last 40-some odd years, and the sources dry up. Sure, there's government funding for 'underprivileged' students, but there's not a lot of it, and most of those students get shuffled off to a state university. Also, the funding cuts off as soon as they get a 'salable' degree, like an associates or bachelors. In most fields, an associates

>> These reforms reflect the Obama administration's ongoing commitment to promote policies that embrace talented students from other countries...while ensuring talented students and workers in the United States continue to get screwed.

There is a lot of false on this thread. An OPT is crucial for the best and the brightest. A F-1 student is not granted the intent to immigrate. They are considered as visitors. Even during OPT they are F-1 students who are supposed to return home after the OPT. OPT status lets the students move jobs and companies don't have to pay through their nose to get someone who is working elsewhere working on an OPT.

A H1-b on the other hand has a dual intent. Every single time an employee leaves a company and switch

These visa workers are far from the "best and brightest" they are ordinary workers, taking ordinary jobs

I personally know several people who graduated with me and who now work at big tech firms like IBM/Google/Oracle/Apple/Facebook on a work visa and they are definitely not ordinary - which is subjective anyway. Importantly - not only do they get paid the same as US citizens, but they are more expensive to hire because of the legal fees involved in their hiring. So, what evidence do you have for your claims?

This while the US suffers it worst long-term unemployment since the great depression.

The largest class of unemployed people in the US does not compare to these workers. The vast majority d

Visa workers are not "immigrants" they are temporary labor. An immigrant is somebody who leave his/her home country and permenantly settles in another country.

H1-B is "dual intent" (to immigrate) visa for a reason. A lot of people on H1-B come to the country so that they can apply for a green card here. The only other choice a typical skilled worker has to get American citizenship is green card lottery, which is, well, a lottery - it cannot be relied upon as a definite path to citizenship.

"allows foreign science, technology, engineering and math grads to work in the U.S. for 29 months without a work visa"

It's much better politics to create a special "29 month education investment repayment work visa" to "allow certain foreign science, technology, engineering, and math graduates to use their valuable skills in the United States, thereby improving American industries and the Untied States economy."

wasn't this same person or was it FBI said foreign spies are infiltrating universities?

"Attracting the best and brightest international talent to our colleges and universities and enabling them to contribute to their professional growth is an important part of our nation's economic, scientific and technological competitiveness," explained DHS Chief Janet Napolitano.

Going back to original topic of bringing in foreign nationals, I think real problem is universities are getting too used to them paying full tuition and pricing out domestic students. Then once we educate these foreign nationals, we kick them out (then their native country gets benefit of their education).

But on question of spies, other countries don't need to send spies because we export our technology and techniques